In the 1980's there was a robot called the Tomy Robot. It
had an extendable gripping arm, a head that swiveled, and
tank tracks that let it zip around a house.

My friends ripped the thing's head off and placed a camera
on it. We had one of the first Picture-In-Picture TV's
back then, and on the TV we could show the image from the
robot's camera. Since the camera was mounted on the swivel
axis, it could be rotated.

Then they tore apart the remote control that controlled
the robot. They wired each of the buttons on the remote
control to one of 16 opto-electronic switches. I was able
to drive the on-off position of each switch on the board
of switches, by sending a 16-bit word out to the parallel
port connected to the board of switches. Each bit turned
one switch on or off, depending on its value of 1 or 0.

Next I programmed a user interface that allowed a
handicapped person to operate the robot's movement,
swivel, and gripper capabilities through a graphical
interface. I wrote the driver's for an infrared sensor
connected to the PC, that could detect head movement (with
the aid of a small piece of reflective material adhering
to the user's forehead). This allowed a handicapped person
to control the X, Y movement of the mouse cursor with
their head. An eye blink sensor placed near the person's
eye allowed them to trigger a mouse click by blinking
their eye. The overall package gave the handicapped user,
even if they were a quadraplegic, the ability to operate
the graphical interface to the mutated Tomy robot.

In summary, a handicapped person could drive the Tomy
robot around the house, see what it was seeing and even
look around the room, and grab things with the gripper
hand.